Marc Lafia
Marc Lafia is an American artist and filmmaker whose work emerges with network culture as it changes our relationship to knowledge, ourselves, our memories, and our bodies, from one of representation to presentation, and from contemplation to new modes of embodiment, producing new subjectivities and new ways of going in the world. He has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate Online, the ZKM, the Centre Pompidou, Anthology Film Archives, International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Minsheng Museum of Art in Shanghai, The Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale 2014 and again at the Whitney 2018. He has taught at Stanford University, the San Francisco Art Institute, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Pratt Institute and Columbia University. His books Image Photograph (2015) and Everyday Cinema 2017 are published by Punctum books.
Address: Brooklyn, New York, United States
Address: Brooklyn, New York, United States
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Visitors find two people talking there, sometimes. Sometimes the chairs are empty.
On the blackboard are polaroids and statements on stickies left there by those who’ve sat in the chairs. With this is an explanation of the terms within which the two people have met, that is a description and flowchart of the algorithm that has made the match.
Not unlike any number of social networking sites the people sitting with each other have through the mailing list of the gallery signed up to meet each for 20 mins in the gallery exhibition space.
The tensions between the qualities of the fluid and the fixed, the flows of information and the landlocked mines of precious metals, the orthodox and the psychedelic, perception management and predictive analytics of big data, what can be and what is, such contractions are found in these same said individuals, para-states, social groups, nations and corporations. All of this raises the question that perhaps the very idea of the individual has been an illusion. And as powerful and empowering the idea of the individual has been, perhaps it’s time to put it to rest or at the very least refigure it again.
How can we conceptualize an idea of a single individual in a specific moment and time when the individual is continually composed and decomposed by other individuals by processes of constant movements of association and repulsion?
sound playing picture, infinitely editable, variable, a tableaux,
DJ and programmer
The age of cut copy paste is now an age of programmability variability. And
programs, programming open up possibility spaces. They also give us pause as to what we might have thought a medium to be. Take the case of the cinema.
With the emergence of electronic and digital media we can no longer take for granted what cinema as an object as medium is.
Here for example is a rule set for sound in multi-window or multi-screen
films. With this simple instruction set we have the possibility of a radically
different kind of mise-en-scène and new modes of narration.
(http://cinema-engine.marclafia.net)
Some of these questions are tailored to the visitors and workers who will
pass by here daily. These questions are merely a conduit to encourage visitors to release the tension of their workday, as well as a way to express and publish themselves within the public domain. Art as Invention 3 (Public Relations) is an active metaphor of the social relations within our technocratic, globalized society.
I returned to the blackboard of Eternal Sunshine in a number of my projects.
because of Mathieu Borysevicz, who I had met at a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.)
Though I had wanted to do works with groups and site specific interventions, with Eternal Sunshine (2011–2012), the installations were very much participatory in the sense of the art object and the audience coming into
a conversation. That happens in the experience of art, always, yes, but with a work that is structured to be participatory, the difference is that the viewer, the
individual becomes a public, and rather than having a one-on-one experience with the work, the work turns the audience onto themselves, both as group
and individual. The work sees them. The work is their engagement and yes, the lounge and pool and blackboards are “works of art” and could be guarded but here they are open to be touched, tactilely explored. The work of art is putting them in relation to those around them, to enact what it is to be public, what it is to be in space sanctioned as art, what is it to be simultaneously private and
public, in an emerging public-private everywhere of the network, where all is art and performing.
I had four large rooms to fill. The first conceit or strategy was to create a large communal space, a pool lounge for the audience to relax read converse, putting on themselves to each other. The art work and the audience could not
be separated. It was performed, the space like software was a format to put on the audience.
By then I had done a good deal with instructions and interactions and the event of art, its material, and here the audience, subjectivation in the cinema and cultural practices come together.
It was called Eternal Sunshine.
Below from:
(Global Times Metro Shanghai, 30 December 2011)
'Eternal Sunshine is akin to a big party in which viewers experience a very physical appreciation of the artworks.
The main room is bathed in strong light, with a mock, waterless swimming pool in the center all set up for visitors to “frolic” around. Around the “pool,” reclining
chairs, beach umbrellas and a set of jazz drums are set up. A ping-pong table and two blackboards (for graffiti lovers) offer extra interactive amusement for visitors. “The space works more as a ‘summer social’ than a formal exhibition
piece, and this perhaps gets viewers thinking about how social networks and interactions work in our daily lives,” Lafia told the Global Times. “Art is always an
event of becoming, an encounter, a way to be present to oneself,” he said.
The 56-year-old American artist (as well a photographer and filmmaker) was invited to exhibit by Zhou Tiehai, the director of the Minsheng Art Museum after
Zhou saw his work Art as Invention at the Shanghai Gallery of Art.
For this show, Lafia has created a space which will “transform the virtual domain of online social networks into a large-scale interactive installation,” in his
own words.
Lafia added: “The space in the context of other works will be an active metaphor for our technocratic society. putting social relations in relief or in advance of a contemplative or passive relation as is often the case in a museum,”
he said.
It would invite us to get happy and at the same time question what this happiness is, what it might mean. Is it in us, the system, in each other, outside us,
in nature, or in our desires?”
Outside of the swimming pool room, there are 44 digits prints of films stills, all from Chinese, French, and Japanese films, and all arrayed in straight lines. Each
picture carries its original title and explanation and the Chinese translations.
“The sequence of stills creates a nonlinear reading of characters and themes across cultures and generations as a way to explore the relationship of the individual to society, but moreover the individual’s desire for personal revolution in relaxation to society revolution,” Lafia told the Global Times.
(Global Times Metro Shanghai, 30 December 2011)
The exhibition had 4 rooms and included these works.
¶ Eternal Sunshine the installation
¶ Public Relations
¶ Film Stills, Still History
¶ Double Fantasy
¶ Self Exposures
¶ Chat Roulette
Books—from codex to clay table, from papyrus to scroll, from hardback to
paperback to e-book—are bound by their material form. Bookbinding is the
process of physically assembling a book from a number of folded or unfolded sheets of paper or other material. In The Unbounded Wor(l)d, Marc Lafia reconsiders the book and re-figures it as a new site of possibility, as a geography, as a territory with new ways of knowing, seeing, and enjoying.
Lafia writes with books. He doesn’t write books; he doesn’t write about books. He uses the books themselves as his material to write new books. The focus of the content has shifted from what’s in the book—the words and information—to the form itself. The material here is not words or facts or fictions but bindings, spines, pages, and the vast cultural discourse of books.
Lafia comes at the book from different angles. He takes up found books and uses their pages, bindings, spine, words, covers, contexts, and layouts to re-situate, re-purpose, and re-imagine the book as a new site, re-embodied and spatially situated. Other times, he builds the book from scratch, usually using complex folding techniques that allow the pages to be juxtaposed or splayed.
These books becomes sites, environments, creating new situations from the spatial, unwinding, re-territorialization and dispersal of the once bound. Here, the book is unbound, unleashing new modes of reckoning—of knowing, seeing, organizing, enjoying.
“Rethinking the conventions of participation, which are today
somewhat orthodox.”
Exploitation, exclusion, cynicism, ruthless pleasure, cooptations,
social transformations, subjectivizing forces, the art object, material precariousness, precarity, unfold a complex knot, excess, self becoming, to awake to the other, the other in me, ones own warm breadth – how do these come to meaning how do
we come to be being?
I’ve always wanted to form on-the-go international collectives, being varied
people together collectively, like a theatre or study group, like I had done with Art as Invention, or Art and Culture, or my films.
In the films I made always had a nucleus of an artistic group, a sort of
collective and the software projects a distributed authoring environment. With 69 Love Stories I wanted to bring together both computational and cultural ideas of repetition and difference, instructions and inscriptions and ideas for distributed and collective authoring. I wanted to find ways to be others and get to know them through collaborative works.
garde music is not at all new. Think only of Sol Lewitt, Yoko Ono, Le Monte
Young, Boulez onto Sophie Calle, Vito Acconci, Oulipo, each working with
prescribed sets of constraints. These artists worked with algorithms and
instructions prior to our world of software and computation which of course amplifies and takes further instructions.
We live within instructions, coming to us all the time over networks and
their codes, within the software protocols that overlay our environment,
let alone all the legal and civil codes, restraints and processes which order
the everyday. Such things tend to go into the background until of course
something goes wrong, like planes disappearing in the skies, or cops
killing too many people or diseases crossing borders, or when networks are
compromised and we learn we’ve been listening in on the phone calls of the
German Prime Minister.
Over time my interest become instructions and the various apparatuses that put them forward. Setting up an envelope of possibilities. instructions put forward procedures to explore a possibility space, instances, protocols and procedures, are in themselves technical instruments that exponentially scale up in a networked and computational culture.
here in these pictures that follow, you can sense another kind of reading and being with art, one that goes with the work immediately, sensually, senses it, converses with it, caresses it and confronts it, saying I’ll go with you, I feel you.
Over time this mode of performative interaction became a way for us, together, to go with the work of art and to not only share and communicate with each other our pleasure of it, but by going with the work, to create a new kind of pleasure, an assemblage of pleasure, that is the work and us.
pictures of photography, fashion, painting, cinema, reportage and through the photographic documentation of them in the activity of performing for these photographs.
In the time spent together the staging of the photographs are not reenactments of the images they are presented but enactments of themselves through the opportunity the pictures afford.
Students are in the present but anxious about the future. yet what the
photographs show us is how present they are to the camera, the act of
photography. seeing themselves photographed. Both the images they are
presented and photography itself sets a stage to act and so the students enact actions, feelings often withheld or below the surface.
It is hoped that this method will create a multivalent document of the
students and the reading misreading of them will exceed itself and produce
something more the artist or students are able to see—that is, we will only see something in the exhibition of select photographs taken during the 3 days spent together.
The title Here and Elsewhere has multiple meanings, referring to both the here of the photograph and the elsewhere it refers to, the elsewhere that also allows us to see here, and the elsewhere that takes us away from the here so in a sense we are neither here or somewhere else but between both.
What happens when you turn the camera on and speak to it, perform for
it, let it observe you? When you use it as a way to say things about yourself.
In Revolution of Everyday Life (2011), the question is how do we come to know ourselves and how to live in the world. I got to a certain point with Revolution where I could sense to know the actors intimately and more so, to have them reveal themselves to me, to themselves, to the work, intimately, I’d have to ask them to record themselves alone, privately. When I brought this up with them I was surprised how keen they were to do this. So week to week I gave out several f ip cameras and asked them to make recordings of themselves, there were specific instructions that came from performance and video art of allowing them to be simply a body in space, for them to have no fear of the mundane, to just be. Which is not easy.
negotiating the other, presenting oneself, one to one, open society, network
photography, cinema as live recording, an encounter, intimacy of being there and not there, one’s narrative, the erotics of being seen, of presentation, representation, the performative, the global, the camera, what the network up till now has not given humanity, Brecht and the promise of radio, being one to one and not one to many, the now, not art in the age of mechanical reproduction but the performative now, seeing, being seen at the same time, the event of seeing and being seen, dressing up, bodily and not bodily, anonymity and disclosure. (ml)
- In today’s networked and social media the performers and the audience are the same people. Representations become self representations, they become actions, they become the ever articulation of a “this moment.” Social media has turned what were once very private actions—sitting in front of a computer, writing and journaling—into actions that are immediately public. As such they produce and constitute both a new public, and a reconsideration of our media, our cities and spaces, our archives, of how we use, read and see representation—which is no doubt today always and already performative.
(Neshant Shah)
now. If the first generation web was about seeing or on optic onto the world, which some say was passive viewing, by 2004 forward, the upsurge of user generated content, image based bulletin boards, micro blogging, social interaction and collaboration exploded. Inside these platforms there were all kinds of virtual communities. And all kinds of trolling, viruses, hacks, memes, everything had folded into the network, radically changing notions of representations from being seen to exposing oneself. Further on with the pervasive amount of AI in the network, in the internet of things, in
biomedical devices, in the environment, vast troves of data had been collected on everyone. In this new world there was no place not to be seen. By 2010 we had all given ourselves, thousands and thousands of times over, our every gestures and actions, which continually accumulated became our very “selves” and “we” were simply an interface, one of the managed masses processed by ever complex neural networks built by computational engines. Cambridge Analytica, the data profi ling consultancy that brought in the 2017 US president had more than 2000 data points for every American citizen, knowing their fears and likes, their trigger points and how to reach them. Yet all along we continued to expose ourselves, construct the fiction of ourselves.
In some sense, all films are computational, all films a kind of .net art. Think about it: a film is the product of a selection from different shots, hours of dailies and coverage—the film rests on a database. The film we end up seeing is only one possibility; cut it again and there’s a different movie. And then there’s the manner in which these scenes and these shots come to be this film. The director, the editor, the producers, the screenwriters—not to mention an entire cast of interested parties—conspire to make the final cut we see. Which is to say, films are built on a database and are authored by a network.
relational, the idea of the image, the ontology of the image, the single image, the image alone, begins more and more to lose authority. Perhaps that is why in the mid 90s we began to see life size and larger photographs. Size can confer authority, but regardless the size of the image, there is always a next image, an image answering, conversing with another image.
Permutations are multi-screen films Lafia started in 2005 that he produced once
a day with a Canon Xapshot digital camera over a period of several years that
can be viewed at Lafia’s Cinema Engine site. In Permutations, Lafia continued
to pursue his interest in “the instrumentation of playback in multiple screens and
what could be articulated and continually re-articulated in the image-sound
relationship through permutation” as “played and composed in a software
environment created in MAX MSP.” Influenced by the work of Raymond Queneau
and Georges Perec, and Oulipo, the group Queneau and Perec formed in France
in 1960 that investigated strategies for constrained writing for potential literature,
Lafia explores in Permutations how sound inflects the image and what potential
cinemas can emerge from the digital characteristic of an excess of organizational
and narrative tropes.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Lafia)
characteristics of the instrumentation of computation, engineering, software, read/listen/watch/write/re-write – programs. Procedure and program, these are the things that interest me. And today they are very, very common.
In the world of art, instructions coming out of conceptual art and avant
garde music is not at all new. Think only of Sol LeWitt, Yoko Ono, La
Monte Young, Boulez through to Sophie Calle, Oulipo, each working with
a prescribed sets of constraints. These artists worked with algorithms and
instructions prior to our world of software and computation which of course amplifies and takes further instructions.
I was first introduced to the idea of computation by a musician and saw that it allowed for continual iteration and variability. My films now would be made with instructions, in this case instructions of code.
In algorithmic computation, the movement of stillness, viewed in a
continuum, is something other than the cinematograph: it is an ellipsis of
movements or instances in a varying or computational register of ordering
and time. In such a register, one that is computational and algorithmic, the
movement of instances (as in 24 frames a second) is not sequential (as if to replicate the real) but simply instances, movements to be ordered in any
which way.
Visitors find two people talking there, sometimes. Sometimes the chairs are empty.
On the blackboard are polaroids and statements on stickies left there by those who’ve sat in the chairs. With this is an explanation of the terms within which the two people have met, that is a description and flowchart of the algorithm that has made the match.
Not unlike any number of social networking sites the people sitting with each other have through the mailing list of the gallery signed up to meet each for 20 mins in the gallery exhibition space.
The tensions between the qualities of the fluid and the fixed, the flows of information and the landlocked mines of precious metals, the orthodox and the psychedelic, perception management and predictive analytics of big data, what can be and what is, such contractions are found in these same said individuals, para-states, social groups, nations and corporations. All of this raises the question that perhaps the very idea of the individual has been an illusion. And as powerful and empowering the idea of the individual has been, perhaps it’s time to put it to rest or at the very least refigure it again.
How can we conceptualize an idea of a single individual in a specific moment and time when the individual is continually composed and decomposed by other individuals by processes of constant movements of association and repulsion?
sound playing picture, infinitely editable, variable, a tableaux,
DJ and programmer
The age of cut copy paste is now an age of programmability variability. And
programs, programming open up possibility spaces. They also give us pause as to what we might have thought a medium to be. Take the case of the cinema.
With the emergence of electronic and digital media we can no longer take for granted what cinema as an object as medium is.
Here for example is a rule set for sound in multi-window or multi-screen
films. With this simple instruction set we have the possibility of a radically
different kind of mise-en-scène and new modes of narration.
(http://cinema-engine.marclafia.net)
Some of these questions are tailored to the visitors and workers who will
pass by here daily. These questions are merely a conduit to encourage visitors to release the tension of their workday, as well as a way to express and publish themselves within the public domain. Art as Invention 3 (Public Relations) is an active metaphor of the social relations within our technocratic, globalized society.
I returned to the blackboard of Eternal Sunshine in a number of my projects.
because of Mathieu Borysevicz, who I had met at a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.)
Though I had wanted to do works with groups and site specific interventions, with Eternal Sunshine (2011–2012), the installations were very much participatory in the sense of the art object and the audience coming into
a conversation. That happens in the experience of art, always, yes, but with a work that is structured to be participatory, the difference is that the viewer, the
individual becomes a public, and rather than having a one-on-one experience with the work, the work turns the audience onto themselves, both as group
and individual. The work sees them. The work is their engagement and yes, the lounge and pool and blackboards are “works of art” and could be guarded but here they are open to be touched, tactilely explored. The work of art is putting them in relation to those around them, to enact what it is to be public, what it is to be in space sanctioned as art, what is it to be simultaneously private and
public, in an emerging public-private everywhere of the network, where all is art and performing.
I had four large rooms to fill. The first conceit or strategy was to create a large communal space, a pool lounge for the audience to relax read converse, putting on themselves to each other. The art work and the audience could not
be separated. It was performed, the space like software was a format to put on the audience.
By then I had done a good deal with instructions and interactions and the event of art, its material, and here the audience, subjectivation in the cinema and cultural practices come together.
It was called Eternal Sunshine.
Below from:
(Global Times Metro Shanghai, 30 December 2011)
'Eternal Sunshine is akin to a big party in which viewers experience a very physical appreciation of the artworks.
The main room is bathed in strong light, with a mock, waterless swimming pool in the center all set up for visitors to “frolic” around. Around the “pool,” reclining
chairs, beach umbrellas and a set of jazz drums are set up. A ping-pong table and two blackboards (for graffiti lovers) offer extra interactive amusement for visitors. “The space works more as a ‘summer social’ than a formal exhibition
piece, and this perhaps gets viewers thinking about how social networks and interactions work in our daily lives,” Lafia told the Global Times. “Art is always an
event of becoming, an encounter, a way to be present to oneself,” he said.
The 56-year-old American artist (as well a photographer and filmmaker) was invited to exhibit by Zhou Tiehai, the director of the Minsheng Art Museum after
Zhou saw his work Art as Invention at the Shanghai Gallery of Art.
For this show, Lafia has created a space which will “transform the virtual domain of online social networks into a large-scale interactive installation,” in his
own words.
Lafia added: “The space in the context of other works will be an active metaphor for our technocratic society. putting social relations in relief or in advance of a contemplative or passive relation as is often the case in a museum,”
he said.
It would invite us to get happy and at the same time question what this happiness is, what it might mean. Is it in us, the system, in each other, outside us,
in nature, or in our desires?”
Outside of the swimming pool room, there are 44 digits prints of films stills, all from Chinese, French, and Japanese films, and all arrayed in straight lines. Each
picture carries its original title and explanation and the Chinese translations.
“The sequence of stills creates a nonlinear reading of characters and themes across cultures and generations as a way to explore the relationship of the individual to society, but moreover the individual’s desire for personal revolution in relaxation to society revolution,” Lafia told the Global Times.
(Global Times Metro Shanghai, 30 December 2011)
The exhibition had 4 rooms and included these works.
¶ Eternal Sunshine the installation
¶ Public Relations
¶ Film Stills, Still History
¶ Double Fantasy
¶ Self Exposures
¶ Chat Roulette
Books—from codex to clay table, from papyrus to scroll, from hardback to
paperback to e-book—are bound by their material form. Bookbinding is the
process of physically assembling a book from a number of folded or unfolded sheets of paper or other material. In The Unbounded Wor(l)d, Marc Lafia reconsiders the book and re-figures it as a new site of possibility, as a geography, as a territory with new ways of knowing, seeing, and enjoying.
Lafia writes with books. He doesn’t write books; he doesn’t write about books. He uses the books themselves as his material to write new books. The focus of the content has shifted from what’s in the book—the words and information—to the form itself. The material here is not words or facts or fictions but bindings, spines, pages, and the vast cultural discourse of books.
Lafia comes at the book from different angles. He takes up found books and uses their pages, bindings, spine, words, covers, contexts, and layouts to re-situate, re-purpose, and re-imagine the book as a new site, re-embodied and spatially situated. Other times, he builds the book from scratch, usually using complex folding techniques that allow the pages to be juxtaposed or splayed.
These books becomes sites, environments, creating new situations from the spatial, unwinding, re-territorialization and dispersal of the once bound. Here, the book is unbound, unleashing new modes of reckoning—of knowing, seeing, organizing, enjoying.
“Rethinking the conventions of participation, which are today
somewhat orthodox.”
Exploitation, exclusion, cynicism, ruthless pleasure, cooptations,
social transformations, subjectivizing forces, the art object, material precariousness, precarity, unfold a complex knot, excess, self becoming, to awake to the other, the other in me, ones own warm breadth – how do these come to meaning how do
we come to be being?
I’ve always wanted to form on-the-go international collectives, being varied
people together collectively, like a theatre or study group, like I had done with Art as Invention, or Art and Culture, or my films.
In the films I made always had a nucleus of an artistic group, a sort of
collective and the software projects a distributed authoring environment. With 69 Love Stories I wanted to bring together both computational and cultural ideas of repetition and difference, instructions and inscriptions and ideas for distributed and collective authoring. I wanted to find ways to be others and get to know them through collaborative works.
garde music is not at all new. Think only of Sol Lewitt, Yoko Ono, Le Monte
Young, Boulez onto Sophie Calle, Vito Acconci, Oulipo, each working with
prescribed sets of constraints. These artists worked with algorithms and
instructions prior to our world of software and computation which of course amplifies and takes further instructions.
We live within instructions, coming to us all the time over networks and
their codes, within the software protocols that overlay our environment,
let alone all the legal and civil codes, restraints and processes which order
the everyday. Such things tend to go into the background until of course
something goes wrong, like planes disappearing in the skies, or cops
killing too many people or diseases crossing borders, or when networks are
compromised and we learn we’ve been listening in on the phone calls of the
German Prime Minister.
Over time my interest become instructions and the various apparatuses that put them forward. Setting up an envelope of possibilities. instructions put forward procedures to explore a possibility space, instances, protocols and procedures, are in themselves technical instruments that exponentially scale up in a networked and computational culture.
here in these pictures that follow, you can sense another kind of reading and being with art, one that goes with the work immediately, sensually, senses it, converses with it, caresses it and confronts it, saying I’ll go with you, I feel you.
Over time this mode of performative interaction became a way for us, together, to go with the work of art and to not only share and communicate with each other our pleasure of it, but by going with the work, to create a new kind of pleasure, an assemblage of pleasure, that is the work and us.
pictures of photography, fashion, painting, cinema, reportage and through the photographic documentation of them in the activity of performing for these photographs.
In the time spent together the staging of the photographs are not reenactments of the images they are presented but enactments of themselves through the opportunity the pictures afford.
Students are in the present but anxious about the future. yet what the
photographs show us is how present they are to the camera, the act of
photography. seeing themselves photographed. Both the images they are
presented and photography itself sets a stage to act and so the students enact actions, feelings often withheld or below the surface.
It is hoped that this method will create a multivalent document of the
students and the reading misreading of them will exceed itself and produce
something more the artist or students are able to see—that is, we will only see something in the exhibition of select photographs taken during the 3 days spent together.
The title Here and Elsewhere has multiple meanings, referring to both the here of the photograph and the elsewhere it refers to, the elsewhere that also allows us to see here, and the elsewhere that takes us away from the here so in a sense we are neither here or somewhere else but between both.
What happens when you turn the camera on and speak to it, perform for
it, let it observe you? When you use it as a way to say things about yourself.
In Revolution of Everyday Life (2011), the question is how do we come to know ourselves and how to live in the world. I got to a certain point with Revolution where I could sense to know the actors intimately and more so, to have them reveal themselves to me, to themselves, to the work, intimately, I’d have to ask them to record themselves alone, privately. When I brought this up with them I was surprised how keen they were to do this. So week to week I gave out several f ip cameras and asked them to make recordings of themselves, there were specific instructions that came from performance and video art of allowing them to be simply a body in space, for them to have no fear of the mundane, to just be. Which is not easy.
negotiating the other, presenting oneself, one to one, open society, network
photography, cinema as live recording, an encounter, intimacy of being there and not there, one’s narrative, the erotics of being seen, of presentation, representation, the performative, the global, the camera, what the network up till now has not given humanity, Brecht and the promise of radio, being one to one and not one to many, the now, not art in the age of mechanical reproduction but the performative now, seeing, being seen at the same time, the event of seeing and being seen, dressing up, bodily and not bodily, anonymity and disclosure. (ml)
- In today’s networked and social media the performers and the audience are the same people. Representations become self representations, they become actions, they become the ever articulation of a “this moment.” Social media has turned what were once very private actions—sitting in front of a computer, writing and journaling—into actions that are immediately public. As such they produce and constitute both a new public, and a reconsideration of our media, our cities and spaces, our archives, of how we use, read and see representation—which is no doubt today always and already performative.
(Neshant Shah)
now. If the first generation web was about seeing or on optic onto the world, which some say was passive viewing, by 2004 forward, the upsurge of user generated content, image based bulletin boards, micro blogging, social interaction and collaboration exploded. Inside these platforms there were all kinds of virtual communities. And all kinds of trolling, viruses, hacks, memes, everything had folded into the network, radically changing notions of representations from being seen to exposing oneself. Further on with the pervasive amount of AI in the network, in the internet of things, in
biomedical devices, in the environment, vast troves of data had been collected on everyone. In this new world there was no place not to be seen. By 2010 we had all given ourselves, thousands and thousands of times over, our every gestures and actions, which continually accumulated became our very “selves” and “we” were simply an interface, one of the managed masses processed by ever complex neural networks built by computational engines. Cambridge Analytica, the data profi ling consultancy that brought in the 2017 US president had more than 2000 data points for every American citizen, knowing their fears and likes, their trigger points and how to reach them. Yet all along we continued to expose ourselves, construct the fiction of ourselves.
In some sense, all films are computational, all films a kind of .net art. Think about it: a film is the product of a selection from different shots, hours of dailies and coverage—the film rests on a database. The film we end up seeing is only one possibility; cut it again and there’s a different movie. And then there’s the manner in which these scenes and these shots come to be this film. The director, the editor, the producers, the screenwriters—not to mention an entire cast of interested parties—conspire to make the final cut we see. Which is to say, films are built on a database and are authored by a network.
relational, the idea of the image, the ontology of the image, the single image, the image alone, begins more and more to lose authority. Perhaps that is why in the mid 90s we began to see life size and larger photographs. Size can confer authority, but regardless the size of the image, there is always a next image, an image answering, conversing with another image.
Permutations are multi-screen films Lafia started in 2005 that he produced once
a day with a Canon Xapshot digital camera over a period of several years that
can be viewed at Lafia’s Cinema Engine site. In Permutations, Lafia continued
to pursue his interest in “the instrumentation of playback in multiple screens and
what could be articulated and continually re-articulated in the image-sound
relationship through permutation” as “played and composed in a software
environment created in MAX MSP.” Influenced by the work of Raymond Queneau
and Georges Perec, and Oulipo, the group Queneau and Perec formed in France
in 1960 that investigated strategies for constrained writing for potential literature,
Lafia explores in Permutations how sound inflects the image and what potential
cinemas can emerge from the digital characteristic of an excess of organizational
and narrative tropes.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Lafia)
characteristics of the instrumentation of computation, engineering, software, read/listen/watch/write/re-write – programs. Procedure and program, these are the things that interest me. And today they are very, very common.
In the world of art, instructions coming out of conceptual art and avant
garde music is not at all new. Think only of Sol LeWitt, Yoko Ono, La
Monte Young, Boulez through to Sophie Calle, Oulipo, each working with
a prescribed sets of constraints. These artists worked with algorithms and
instructions prior to our world of software and computation which of course amplifies and takes further instructions.
I was first introduced to the idea of computation by a musician and saw that it allowed for continual iteration and variability. My films now would be made with instructions, in this case instructions of code.
In algorithmic computation, the movement of stillness, viewed in a
continuum, is something other than the cinematograph: it is an ellipsis of
movements or instances in a varying or computational register of ordering
and time. In such a register, one that is computational and algorithmic, the
movement of instances (as in 24 frames a second) is not sequential (as if to replicate the real) but simply instances, movements to be ordered in any
which way.
but volume, mass, perhaps even ideal forms. What might this be? And what
of Morphologies, Geologies, Topographies? Not the exhibition as a script,
as notional, as instructions, as Eternal Sunshine, as instructing bodies of architecture, as formatting, no, forms in side forms, things, stuff, space, forms, monoliths, objects.
object
figure
space
bodies
objecthood
just what kind of object what kind of material material itself
what does this itself mean?
vitrine, shrine, monolith, serial structure
tactility and shapes
shaping light, shaping material
shaping the viewer
“display” to distinguished from a putative tradition or genre of
“installation” ala hirschhorn
work every season, and so my interest in the social circulation of the image and its instrumentality now was to be spliced into a larger query, the creation and circulation of beauty and war in a global circuit of trade, including luxury goods, Igbo statuary, arms, ammunition, search algorithms, genes, hashtags, fractals, fertility goddesses, eggs and identity.
Each room in the gallery would be a kind of platform to make visible
in an elegant, often whimsical way, a network of relations and objects that commingle vastly different materials including wood and plaster, hand drawings and digital collages, eggs and rocket launchers, one ton shipping bags and online identities.
If we think of the earth, bodies and societies as writing material on which the original writing has been effaced we can nevertheless see and imagine the traces that remain.
With the Information Palimpsest the artist, like the cook, me, would note how materials in their imbrication undergo a process of domestication, how the tactile becomes informational, yet the traces of past material histories now immaterial histories remain.
This element of drama or theatricality, to Kounellis’s mind, is what separates him and his European contemporaries from American minimalists such as Donald Judd or Carl Andre. “It is clear that minimalist art has a very different emotional effect. The minimalist point of reference was linked to a Protestant civilisation. For those Americans, drama was démodé. The minimalists didn’t want to have anything to do with images, but my work can be connected to a painting such as Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters (1885). There are various ways to be modern, and various ways of seeing in modernism.”
In his work ‘The Language of New Media’, Lev Manovich situates new media in the advent of the network, desktop publishing, and digital media. The keys to understanding this new media are the procedures and applications of interface and their relationship to tools such as the virtual camera, the database, and the idea of object oriented programming where the user becomes an author and in this sense a cineaste who at their desktop has now all the possibility of authoring multimedia as objects and then putting them on the network. The Network is a vast inventory of media objects and a distribution channel.
It could be said that Manovich’s characterization of New Media is one of a set of tools that allow for the construction or deconstruction of much more than an image.
It can also be said that the artist has long ago abandoned the work of producing images for representation. More precisely the work is an image of thought, the object the image of this thought, this thought of a procedure, a process a set of instructions.
The artist sets about creating processes, procedures, formats, and signs. In Nicolas Borriaud’s sense, art is about producing a relationship with the world, with objects, with time, with actions – this relationship to the world and its signs, produces the world and looks at how the world is produced. It is an image of becoming. Art is that which becomes and becomes.
Becoming, in Deleuze’s sense, is the notion of the world not as a place but always as a becoming place and a becoming being, the world always in front of us, always in motion, always a present.
Becoming, things as process – is indeed an inherent property of algorithmic and interactive structures. But it’s much more than that, older then the now ubiquitous idea of computing and the universal machine.
This becoming is a begetting of instructions and we can think of them both formally and in a number of ways, conceptually. We might think of instructions as how we bake a cake, put together IKEA furniture, play chess, move about the 88 keys of a piano, enter our pictures into Instagram, each set of rules allow for a known or variable outcome. Each let us make more cakes, play more chess, process more photographs.
When most of us think of art, we think it deals with intuition, inspiration and uniqueness, and yes it does. But it often deals with or entails something else and that is rules, instructions. Yet most of us don’t associate the term instructions with art, maybe style or signature, but instructions no, we most likely associate rules with engineering.
Instructions can be understood as an engine, an algorithm, between an outcome and an intention, they are process.
Once forms or formats are known they can be built by instructions because we know the form, we know the rules and as we know the rules, we can reverse engineer what we have and employ their instructions to build the known form. But some instructions are much more that one outcome and can be a variation of outcomes even though they give sense of a known form. Once we know the form or the format often times the work arrives dead or leaden. That’s why artists re-invent forms, to make them contemporary, to make them reflect the moment and sometimes of course as old forms are over turned, entirely new ones emerge.
Take for example the shape or the form of the telegraph that becomes the phone that becomes television that becomes the videogame that becomes online media. Take music videos or a genre film, a Broadway musical, the theatre or what constitutes an artwork, typography, surfaces on buildings, clothing, the structure of information, the palette of color imaging, with the advent of new materials, they continually change and their shapes change.
These can be understood as forms and formats, some cultural, some technical and they often come about by new technologies. Often new technologies create entirely new forms, new medias, new possibilities, new languages, new social codes, new social relations, new networks, a new social being, new social discourses, new forms of intimacy, new forms of distraction. After a while new forms are codified, but before they are, before they are every known, they are forged and found, by necessity, by invention, by will, by accident, and by instructions that are then repeated again and again.
In time instructions and rules become invisible, become unspoken, they are no longer seen, they are no longer novel, become habits, they become entrenched, they become cultures. Yet every culture is a dynamic and ever changing entity and becoming. The many pressures, the many internal and external circumstances that force it to change, with the fall and rise of industries, population flows, wars and transport, new software systems, speed, information, the vibrancy and languages of new immigrants, new configurations to urban areas to outlying country sides – all of this requires and results in new visualization, new information, new sound, new stimuli, a new rhythm – there is a continual invention of a new audio-visual sensorial dimension, for clothing, sound, ideas, software, still images, architecture, urban planning, typography.
The response to this and relation to this to the ever evolving new human condition both locally and globally, the texture, the fabric, the feeling, the image, the sound, the color, the materials, all of this, the information architect, the urban planner, the typographer, the designer, the advertiser, the artist, the moving image maker respond to and work within in a continual dialogue. In this new formats evolve, old formats must be refreshed to enliven us, sustain us and have us encounter ourselves and know ourselves and become the world that we can live in.
As art takes more and more technological and cultural forms into its ever-expanding realm, we see can that instruction have been fundamental to modernity and contemporary arts. And with the computation they will become more so.
While working as an information designer, a filmmaker, and a practicing artist, and in turn teaching in each of these disciplines at various institutions, I’ve found that preparing to produce work and preparing to teach begin at different starting points, and I questioned whether this really needs to be the case.
I have felt a correspondence between these disparate disciplines, between sound and architecture, between information architecture and the moving image, text and image, stillness and movement, software and memory. There are shared concerns with materials, software, instructions, sensuality, image/non-image, social relations, space and silence, flows and intensities, these are all the concerns of architects, artists, filmmakers, information architects, time-based artists, clothing designers, UI designers, urban planners, editors, and many more. So what if we could build a manual that would break down the supposed barriers between these practices.
What follows is a series of procedures and processes, a series that is simply a ‘snapshot’ of a moment in time with what is here fixed, and what is there - electronically - permeable and infinitely extensible. In fact this is what instructions are about - any possible iteration, any possible line of flight - mutation, emergence, co-habitation, formation, deformation, noise, order, ephemeralness, contingency, across multiple sites and multiple instantiations. So here goes.
One last word, a book like this can’t be definitive, it is simply not about that but rather a space, or dictionaries, folios of terms and keywords, which recognize the ridiculousness of attempting to catalogue, name, and explain reality but in turn give impetus to create new realities
In our globalized world, the idea of the individual and the contours of the self have become increasingly permeable while at the same time hardened.
The tensions between the qualities of the fluid and the fixed, the flows of information and the landlocked mines of precious metals, the orthodox and the psychedelic, perception management and predictive analytics of big data, what can be and what is, such contractions are found in these same said individuals, para-states, social groups, nations and corporations. All of this raises the question that perhaps the very idea of the individual has been an illusion. And as powerful and empowering the idea of the individual has been, perhaps it’s time to put it to rest or at the very least refigure it again.
How can we conceptualize an idea of a single individual in a specific moment and time when the individual is continually composed and decomposed by other individuals by processes of constant movements of association and repulsion?
If individual things (res singulares) exist only as a consequence of the existence of other individual things (EIP28), with which they participate in an infinite network
of connections (Balibar 1997:27). Notice here that this also implies that causality must not be understood in the sense of a linear succession of events, but rather as a multiplicity of connections of causal links between individuals, which are made up of more simple and more complex individuals all causally related.... Otherwise said, every individual is constantly composed and decomposed by other individuals with which it enters into contact through a process of individuation, which involves both the infra-individual and the supra-individual levels (Balibar 1997:27). And it is in order to render this complexity and plurality that Balibar argued individuality must be understood as a transindividuality (For those who like to trace the origins of this ontology of the transindividual, Balibar draws inspiration from Gilbert Simondon’s L’individuation psychique et collective). Individuals thus understood are therefore never atoms, events, let alone subjects, given once for all. They are processes, the result of constant movements of association and repulsion that connect more simple individuals with other simple individuals, but also with more complex ones that constantly do and undo a body.
(Chiara Bottici, “Bodies in plural: Towards an anarcha-feminist manifesto,” talking about Etienne Balibar’s Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality)
Once, perhaps, they went into an archive, well certain images and records.
The word “archive” derived from the Greek Arkheion, a house, or the residence of the superior magistrates. Images and documents were kept in the houses of the powerful. As such the archive more often preserves the history of the victors, while presenting such history as reality or scientific truth. The archive is a realist machine, a body of power and knowledge, and it sustains itself by repetition. More precisely, the authority of traditional archives controls and regulates the reproduction of their items.
Press Release Punctum Books publishes seminal work on artist/filmmaker/author Marc Lafia.
Punctum Books, the open-access publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing, is proud to announce the release of The Event of Art: a seminal publication on the work of artist, filmmaker, and author Marc Lafia.
The book interweaves essays, notes, photographic archives, and a host of exhibitions wherein Lafia traverses his wide body of work examining the cultural landscape as it moves from analog to digital. Lafia’s work emerges with remix and network culture as it changes our
relationship to knowledge, ourselves, our memories, and our bodies: from one of representation to presentation, and from contemplation to new modes of embodiment,
producing new subjectivities and new ways of going in the world. In front of us now is not the image but rather the protocols and interfaces to a networked culture, ever re-mixable and variable. Through fifty-two modular chapters and over eight hundred pages and images, Lafia
takes us from his computational works to his later interest in the realm of the sensible and sensate. Here he presents art as the medium itself, giving us wide permission to explore and examine our deepest feelings and senses, our world and its becoming.
The book is introduced by two essays: the first by curator and art dealer Mathieu Borysevicz recounting meeting Lafia at his first and only artist residency after spending years in Hollywood as a screenwriter and film director (working with Madonna, Michael Jackson, David
Fincher, writing early drafts of Judge Dread, Iron Man, Software and others) and then Silicon Valley (as founder of artandculture.com). Borysevicz recounts Lafia’s tracing of media archaeology from the VCR to MTV to computation to network culture. He details the many projects he produced for Lafia, including the participatory works done at the Shanghai Financial Center and the Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale. In his essay, Borysevicz introduces Lafia’s interest in recording as it becomes digital and computational where “recording is not only memory, and
a data structure, but a permutational instrument and ever-changing horizon of iterations.”
In the second essay, critic Daniel Coffeen writes, “while Lafia may not have a traditional medium – (there is no such thing anymore) – he does in fact have one consistent medium: imaging making itself, its apparati of creation, consumption, and circulation. In fact Lafia’s medium is the
discourse of art – what it is, how it comes to be, how we experience it.”
The Event of Art presents art as a complex material and societal event. The event is
multiple, a continual becoming of perception, being, materiality, participation, a coming to the
senses and the making, shaping and opening to them, not only of oneself, but the world
becoming.
...Lafia's work foreshadow the instantaneous transmission of the image and the omnipresence of the social network that digital technology was ushering in. Marc was aware that the picture, moving from emulsion to code, would initiate an entirely new relation to photography, one in which our bodies, knowledge, and time would unfold. It was in this envelope of technological transition that Marc’s work found its solid ground. Yet while his interest is in the power of the image and its changing universal nature, he also constantly endeavors to make the image one’s very own. His pursuit is about the changing notion of subjectivity, of self, against the assault of representation.
... While Marc’s pursuits were very much informed by his meanderings in
deconstruction theory, his real creative impulse was dictated by his coming
of age with MTV. Variable Montage, Loops and Iterations, Computations and Permutations were some of his earliest and most mesmerizing exploits that came after the artist’s introduction to the programming software engine MAX/MSP.
...Marc would take his interest in recording to interrogate new modes of creating a personal archive and self-organizing computational system. Here recording is not only memory, and a data structure, but a permutational instrument and ever-changing horizon of iterations.
The Event of Art
(forthcoming Punctum Books, winter 2020) presents the work of art as a complex material and societal event. The event is multiple, a continual becoming of perception, being, materiality, participation, a coming to one’s own senses. The work of art is the event of becoming present to one’s embodiment. Lafia traverses and self examines how his early strategies of cultural reading of photography and film, of interface and network culture and social media transform to an investigation of materiality itself. His interest becoming the realm of the sensible and the sensate. Here he presents the idea of art as a medium itself, giving us wide permission to explore and examine our deepest feelings and senses, our world and its becoming.
exchange. The works are the image of the attendant discourse and social bonding, the labeling, the feelings of the blogger, attendant to imagery. Rather
than strip away and isolate the image, we see here that the image is not alone:
it is a currency, and the blog form and the identities we foster there a modality producing axes of innumerable relationships.
In the gift giving of image, an exchange, a relay of exchanges and circulations accrue, where images produce social bindings, empathies, (solidarities, perhaps) and abjections. they produce uncensored conversation
even if it is most often minimal, we see the likes, the names of users, their statements of likes, and in this longings, aloneness, fear and loathing.
Early images were drawn on cave walls, sculpted as statuary, handmade as
masks, carved, engraved and etched on armor and silver, painted on fresco and canvas. With photography all these living and sites-specific works, that come to be called art, are presented to us as two dimensional works on paper and more recently as electronic files. As images we see them out of context and out of time, and as such it is very hard to discern their materiality, their scale and origination, their very purpose and use. And so this led me to want to see and know them as living things, to uncover an anatomy in them.
In the summer of 2012, I spent one month attending an all day drawing class at the Arts Students League in New York City. The following month, I traveled to the town of Wellfleet in Cape Cod, MA with every intention to continue to be engaged with drawing. In my desire to sketch, I took out anatomy books from the Wellfleet Public Library; books by the naturalists Ernst Haeckel, Maria Sibylla Merian, Ernest Thompson Seton and others. Together with a variety of art history books (including Andre Malraux’s extraordinary The Voices of Silence) I wanted to make drawings
that would incorporate the anatomies of the human form with the forms of plants and animals.
One afternoon, while on a walk, having found a dead silver fish, the size of my out stretched hand, I returned with it to my place of drawing. I placed the fish onto a page of one of the anatomy books which had a very precise line drawing of a wolf. I took out my pencil and looked down at the fish. I began to move my eye from the fish to the sheet of drawing paper, back and forth, observing closely the gill bearing creature, translating it to lines on the paper.
When I first started taking photographs, I wanted to take an interesting
photograph, I wanted to photograph interesting things, I wanted to make
ordinary things interesting by photographing them in interesting ways, I
wanted to seek out interesting things that were photographic, I wanted the
camera to do more than simply take a picture, more than record what was in front of me—I was puzzled by photographs, until I realized I could photograph photography and that everything was being photographed, and that I could make photographs of the seeing of pictures, of visualization.
~ Chiara Botti
Lafia is redefining what it means to be a photographer in an age when everyone is living on both sides of the megapixel equation. These images challenge the boundaries between public and private space, as well as personal and universal truth.
~ Douglas Rushkoff
Marc Lafia’s book seeks to map a new territory, to articulate the strange and beautiful new relationships between world, technology, image, and us.
~ Daniel Coffeen
We no longer live in the society of the spectacle, passively seeing the world. Now we perform our very own spectacle in a society that demands it at every turn. We’ve become advertisements of ourselves, our own PR agents, continually putting on a performance and measuring it hour by hour. This is no longer the society of the spectacle but the society of performance. All events have become a pretense to create the image, to orchestrate an image of images that is us. We believe the image confers on us a kind of immortality: just as the artist believes her works collected by a major museum will do the same, we believe the network will forever host the archive we build everyday. The image that is us lives in the circulation of the network. Though a file, though virtual and malleable, made out of bits and instantly accessible to anyone who wants to find it around the world, this image that lives only lives on screen, as virtual as it might be, is a material fact. In its impression, its reception, its archivability, its remixability, the electronic image is today’s photograph.
Image Photograph is a book about, and of, this transformation of the image. In three essays — a foreword by critic and philosopher, Daniel Coffeen; an essay of images and text that explores the varied rhetorics of the image; and a strictly visual essay — the book presents a traversal through photography to arrive at a new understanding of images, what Lafia calls the image-photograph. As Coffeen states,
Lafia takes up the prescribed space of the photograph and, by touring the new conditions of imaging, remaps the very space of photography.
Which is to say, Lafia presents and examines imaging across a breadth of moods, tropes, and contexts in order to see and engage this new technology of image-seeing and image-making — this image-photograph — as it exists today in our age of electronic inscription and networked culture.
At once artist book and critical theory, Image Photograph takes its direction from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and, more recently, Hito Steyerl’s The Wretched of the Screen. Throughout it, Lafia not only writes about the image but constructs images — and, finally, performs this new space of the image-photograph.
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/image-photograph/
~ Daniel Coffeen
Everyday Cinema presents the films (eight features and numerous shorts, computational, and installation films) of Marc Lafia. In his many films (including Exploding Oedipus; Love and Art; Confessions of an Image; Revolution of Everyday Life; Paradise; Hi, How Are You Guest 10497; and 27) Lafia probes what it is to construct an image, to forge systems of representation, to see and represent ourselves. His work has been defined as a cinema of emergence, a cinema of the event, in which the very act of ubiquitous recording creates something new.
In this book, we see Lafia take up cinema — its history, its grandeur, its rules — and apply the conditions of this new, ubiquitous, always-on recording world in order to forge and proffer something new, something relevant, something beautiful: a cinema of the everyday that is anything but everyday. A cinema that is extraordinary.
~ Daniel Coffeen
In his work ‘The Language of New Media’, Lev Manovich situates new media in the advent of the network, desktop publishing, and digital media. The keys to understanding this new media are the procedures and applications of interface and their relationship to tools such as the virtual camera, the database, and the idea of object oriented programming where the user becomes an author and in this sense a cineaste who at their desktop has now all the possibility of authoring multimedia as objects and then putting them on the network. The Network is a vast inventory of media objects and a distribution channel.
It could be said that Manovich’s characterization of New Media is one of a set of tools that allow for the construction or deconstruction of much more than an image.
It can also be said that the artist has long ago abandoned the work of producing images for representation. More precisely the work is an image of thought, the object the image of this thought, this thought of a procedure, a process a set of instructions.
The artist sets about creating processes, procedures, formats, and signs. In Nicolas Borriaud’s sense, art is about producing a relationship with the world, with objects, with time, with actions – this relationship to the world and its signs, produces the world and looks at how the world is produced. It is an image of becoming. Art is that which becomes and becomes.
Becoming, in Deleuze’s sense, is the notion of the world not as a place but always as a becoming place and a becoming being, the world always in front of us, always in motion, always a present.
Becoming, things as process – is indeed an inherent property of algorithmic and interactive structures. But it’s much more than that, older then the now ubiquitous idea of computing and the universal machine.
This becoming is a begetting of instructions and we can think of them both formally and in a number of ways, conceptually. We might think of instructions as how we bake a cake, put together IKEA furniture, play chess, move about the 88 keys of a piano, enter our pictures into Instagram, each set of rules allow for a known or variable outcome. Each let us make more cakes, play more chess, process more photographs.
When most of us think of art, we think it deals with intuition, inspiration and uniqueness, and yes it does. But it often deals with or entails something else and that is rules, instructions. Yet most of us don’t associate the term instructions with art, maybe style or signature, but instructions no, we most likely associate rules with engineering.
Instructions can be understood as an engine, an algorithm, between an outcome and an intention, they are process.
Once forms or formats are known they can be built by instructions because we know the form, we know the rules and as we know the rules, we can reverse engineer what we have and employ their instructions to build the known form. But some instructions are much more that one outcome and can be a variation of outcomes even though they give sense of a known form. Once we know the form or the format often times the work arrives dead or leaden. That’s why artists re-invent forms, to make them contemporary, to make them reflect the moment and sometimes of course as old forms are over turned, entirely new ones emerge.
Take for example the shape or the form of the telegraph that becomes the phone that becomes television that becomes the videogame that becomes online media. Take music videos or a genre film, a Broadway musical, the theatre or what constitutes an artwork, typography, surfaces on buildings, clothing, the structure of information, the palette of color imaging, with the advent of new materials, they continually change and their shapes change.
These can be understood as forms and formats, some cultural, some technical and they often come about by new technologies. Often new technologies create entirely new forms, new medias, new possibilities, new languages, new social codes, new social relations, new networks, a new social being, new social discourses, new forms of intimacy, new forms of distraction. After a while new forms are codified, but before they are, before they are every known, they are forged and found, by necessity, by invention, by will, by accident, and by instructions that are then repeated again and again.
In time instructions and rules become invisible, become unspoken, they are no longer seen, they are no longer novel, become habits, they become entrenched, they become cultures. Yet every culture is a dynamic and ever changing entity and becoming. The many pressures, the many internal and external circumstances that force it to change, with the fall and rise of industries, population flows, wars and transport, new software systems, speed, information, the vibrancy and languages of new immigrants, new configurations to urban areas to outlying country sides – all of this requires and results in new visualization, new information, new sound, new stimuli, a new rhythm – there is a continual invention of a new audio-visual sensorial dimension, for clothing, sound, ideas, software, still images, architecture, urban planning, typography.
The response to this and relation to this to the ever evolving new human condition both locally and globally, the texture, the fabric, the feeling, the image, the sound, the color, the materials, all of this, the information architect, the urban planner, the typographer, the designer, the advertiser, the artist, the moving image maker respond to and work within in a continual dialogue. In this new formats evolve, old formats must be refreshed to enliven us, sustain us and have us encounter ourselves and know ourselves and become the world that we can live in.
As art takes more and more technological and cultural forms into its ever-expanding realm, we see can that instruction have been fundamental to modernity and contemporary arts. And with the computation they will become more so.
While working as an information designer, a filmmaker, and a practicing artist, and in turn teaching in each of these disciplines at various institutions, I’ve found that preparing to produce work and preparing to teach begin at different starting points, and I questioned whether this really needs to be the case.
I have felt a correspondence between these disparate disciplines, between sound and architecture, between information architecture and the moving image, text and image, stillness and movement, software and memory. There are shared concerns with materials, software, instructions, sensuality, image/non-image, social relations, space and silence, flows and intensities, these are all the concerns of architects, artists, filmmakers, information architects, time-based artists, clothing designers, UI designers, urban planners, editors, and many more. So what if we could build a manual that would break down the supposed barriers between these practices.
What follows is a series of procedures and processes, a series that is simply a ‘snapshot’ of a moment in time with what is here fixed, and what is there - electronically - permeable and infinitely extensible. In fact this is what instructions are about - any possible iteration, any possible line of flight - mutation, emergence, co-habitation, formation, deformation, noise, order, ephemeralness, contingency, across multiple sites and multiple instantiations. So here goes.
One last word, a book like this can’t be definitive, it is simply not about that but rather a space, or dictionaries, folios of terms and keywords, which recognize the ridiculousness of attempting to catalogue, name, and explain reality but in turn give impetus to create new realities